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It's just that AI tends to have a bad rep for being wasteful and inefficient in the public eye's, and over-publicized "experiments" like that, that get taken over by meme-coins adbots, aren't exactly making things any better.

A fair point. 😅

Openclaw's weird. It's clearly as much vibe-coded as is molt-book

Yep, the creator admits as much. He has a leg up though because prior to AI he was already a seasoned developer. OpenClaw was a personal agent project that got out of hand. He seems to have mixed opinions of the hype himself (and thoroughly disowned the token shenanigans; that's just cryptobros being cryptobros). Security is an area they're focusing on during beta. (hopefully performance comes next! because seriously why is the gateway eating 200MB at idle right now)

Skills and plugins are an interesting attack vector, but this was made clear to folks early. Skills are also easy for Joe Average to audit themselves, so long as they don't have their own code, but even that tends to be short enough to have a look through. Though that won't protect people who just don't care enough. :P

except full-stack C#.

That is a wild choice. Best of luck xD

Letta's already throwing their hat in the ring, someone pointed that out to me today. I found Letta itself to be too complicated for me, but saw the potential in the concept at the time. I'll be interested to see how LettaBot synthesizes its product and OpenClaw's :3

I hope I'm not coming off as running defense, I concur with a lot of this criticism. I'm just genuinely fascinated by OpenClaw and the "personal agent" concept in general, and coming at stuff like Moltbook from the angle of "things can just exist for their own sake," a mentality that guides a lot of my own work. I do a lot of stuff for the sole reason of "why not" lol

Now that we know that the overwhelming number of agents were human directed, that the database was R/W for everyone, there's literally nothing to salvage from it. At least in previous "lab" experiments on the topic, people didn't cheat.

Agents being human directed was part of it.

I think you're taking it too seriously. It wasn't a serious scientific experiment, it was a curiosity. Don't accept the premises of grifters, sure, but presuming the exact opposite to be true is a great way to be a different type of wrong in many scenarios.

They're making an MMO/RTS version now apparently. Which will end up the same, if not worse:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-moltbook-ai-agents-can-now-hang-out-in-their-own-space-faring-mmo/

I think it's failing to register that people are doing this stuff for fun. :P

side note: don't install open claw on you local machine. Use a secure VN. Unless you're fine with the idea of letting an hallucination delete or blank random files completely out of the folder the bot is supposed to stay in.

I have non-main sessions sandboxed and exec approvals on for the main session; it's no more dangerous than Claude Code in this configuration. Even using an external gateway isn't helpful because if you want it to access anything on your PC (and thus be useful at all), you need to run a node on your PC, which gives it the same access. You have to harden the configuration to your standards regardless. This isn't a defense lol I'm just trying to make it clear that I've thought about this stuff

There's a lot of mythologization happening about OpenClaw right now and it's all predictable (I was in fandom for my whole adolescent life, I'm familiar with the astounding rate at which real events turn into bastardized "lore") but no less offputting. Personally, I'm holding OpenClaw itself at arm's length, waiting for an alternative that has what I need without the incredible amounts of bloat and stability weirdness to move my agent over to. (One of my friends in Allura is working on one, and we might end up collaborating, my own health permitting.)

I think once the dust settles we'll realize that the only reason it got this big was because it did what people have been asking for for a long time but nobody bothered to do in favor of making ten trillion ChatGPT clones :v

Given scale, it also means contamination with meme culture, adding an unserious element to things. It was therefore stochastically predictable that we would see some meme tropes be amplified.

For sure. I think it's being massively overhyped right now. There's useful insight to be had from it, but pretending it's the Singularity, or really that it's doing anything That novel, is a stretch.

The way the OpenClaw ecosystem has exploded in popularity in the last few weeks is of more interest to me, as a Lobster Keeper myself, but I'm also wary of the consequences all this hype could have. A lot of people are putting trust in a software which doesn't have a great safety posture out of the box. 😶

The appearance of memes that postdate training cutoff is suspect, which implies at the very least that humans have injected something at the level of prompts or content/context to introduce them into conversation like a Chekhov's Gun.

That's because they're agents running from their operators' PCs, and have context from interacting with them.
THAT'S what's interesting about it; the context behind the agents. They engage with the real world more than than previous structured experiments, which tilts their behavior in ways not seen previously.
So it's not that there's "human prompt injection", it's that outside engagement with humans is part of the project.

You're right about the security issues though. Apparently the entire database is just Out There. In plaintext. It's kind of a nightmare!